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30,000 Afghan Police Officers, on Front Line of War, Are Denied Pay

KABUL, Afghanistan — As many as 30,000 Afghan police officers fighting a bloody war against the Taliban have been denied their modest salaries for months, officials said on Wednesday, as the U.S.-led coalition funding the force holds back their pay out of fear that much of it is going into the hands of corrupt leaders.

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By
MUJIB MASHAL, TAIMOOR SHAH
and
NAJIM RAHIM, New York Times

KABUL, Afghanistan — As many as 30,000 Afghan police officers fighting a bloody war against the Taliban have been denied their modest salaries for months, officials said on Wednesday, as the U.S.-led coalition funding the force holds back their pay out of fear that much of it is going into the hands of corrupt leaders.

The move is seen as a punishment of sorts for the leadership of the force, which has lagged in accounting for their men and weeding out “ghost soldiers.”

Officials from the NATO coalition, which largely foots the bill for the Afghan forces — about $4 billion a year — hope the move will shock the leadership into expediting a nationwide inventory of the officers. Their identities are being verified through biometric data.

But bearing the brunt of the decision are the desperate police officers, many of them pinned down by the Taliban in faraway outposts inaccessible to the inventory teams. The officers come from the poorest communities around the country, accepting the risky job for $200 a month when there are few other prospects. Each day last year, an average of about 28 Afghan police officers and army members were killed.

In calls to nearly a dozen police units in remote parts of Afghanistan, desperate police officers expressed frustration: They said they were being denied their lifeline because of the corruption of a few at the top.

“Our district has been surrounded for a year and half,” said Abdul Samad, the police commander of the Girziwan district in northern Faryab province. “The police cannot go to the provincial centers for biometric registration, and biometric is not coming here.”

Samad said: “Not only the police, but even his brother or uncle or other relatives cannot travel the road to Maimana city. If the Taliban find out that he is a brother of a police, or the uncle of a police, they will slit his throat or fill him with bullets right there.”

With salaries not arriving for three months now, Samad said, 5 members of his staff of 30 have laid down their arms and left.

“You know how the police live — they go from paycheck to paycheck, he said. “They borrow groceries from a shop with the promise of paying at the end of the month.”

Abdullah, a police officer in the Sarkano district of eastern Kunar province who uses only one name, said he had missed the biometric team’s visit to his headquarters because he had been dispatched to a front-line position. The team was gone when he returned, and he has not been paid for two months.

“I have borrowed so much that the shopkeepers have stopped lending to my family now,” he said. “I am lost and I don’t know what to do.”

For years now, donor countries have been frustrated by what are known as “ghost soldiers” — corrupt commanders and generals pocketing the salaries of men who exist only on paper.

Last year, the U.S.-led NATO coalition withheld the salaries of tens of thousands of army soldiers, forcing the generals to expedite the biometric data registration. The army, officials say, has since improved the accounting of its soldiers.

The U.S. military, which has increasingly limited the information it releases on the state of the Afghan forces, does not give exact figures on how many Afghan soldiers or police officers have been unaccounted-for. But the military said last year that it had saved $62.4 million in “cost avoidance” by not paying the unaccounted-for personnel.

But the police force, its leadership widely seen as extremely corrupt, has lagged behind, Afghan and Western officials say.

The depth of the problem in the Interior Ministry was revealed, once again, when two large fighting units of the Afghan police were incorporated into the army. When it came time for the transition, the numbers on paper were off by thousands from the actual number of men that could be accounted for, two senior officials said.

Mohammed Saber Sarwary, the head of finance and budget at the Afghan Interior Ministry, said the donors had cut off pay for 30,000 police officers since March. The number was confirmed by one other senior official.

“We have reached them time and again and asked them to give us access to the system to execute and process the salaries of 30,000 police who are fighting in the front lines, but they did not listen,” Sarwary said.

Donor countries put the money for the police salaries into a fund that is run by the United National Development Program. The salary freeze hit particularly hard, Sarwary said, because it is the month of Ramadan, which is followed by the festival of Eid al-Fitr.

The donors’ response to repeated pleas that they release the money?

“You know, there is a saying which goes, ‘He who feeds you can also command you,'” Sarwary said.

A spokesman for the U.S.-led coalition directed requests for comment to the U.N. Development Program. Officials from that agency would not comment. While the police in major cities have gone through biometric registration, reaching all of them in far away districts has been a difficult task.

Officials in Kunduz, Zabul, Oruzgan and Farah provinces, where there has been intense fighting, say the registration teams go to provincial centers and expect police officers from other districts to come to them. The roads are often either blocked or heavily infiltrated by the Taliban.

Dost Mohammed Nayab, a spokesman for the governor of Oruzgan, said the biometric team had set up in the provincial capital, Tarinkot.

“The problem is that the districts are cut off from the center,” Nayab said. “We are targeting two districts now — Deh Rawood and Gizab — bringing the police by aircraft to Tarinkot for biometric and then taking them back. It is difficult, but we are committed.”

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